New physics professor causes big buzz on campus

This semester, Case Western Reserve University welcomed Dr. Coleman Greg, a professor from New York City who specializes in gravitational waves. The Department of Physics was overjoyed to include an expert on gravitational waves in their team, and students got to know him for the first time when he taught the Introduction to Modern Physics class (PHYS 221).

In a survey based on the opinions of his students, some were mildly interested by how Dr. Greg taught, but many said they were quite annoyed. One junior said, “On our first day, he introduced us to Newton’s Laws of Motion, but he did it with a PowerPoint that said, ‘You Won’t Believe The Rules This Guy Made!’”

The Athenian then decided to send an undercover reporter to one of his classes to see what all the fuss was about. Over the course of 35 minutes, the professor gave five lists of physics concepts (the third one would shock you!), each accompanied by a funny picture on the PowerPoint slide.

After the lecture, a quiz packet about the previous lecture was passed around. It was 15 questions long with only one question on each page, and the quiz was titled, “Can I Guess Your Grade with These 15 Physics Questions?”

None of the questions had anything to do with physics. One of the questions asked students to pick a fruit, and another question asked about the color of their hair.

As if this didn’t make Greg look suspicious enough, The Athenian was approached by a graduate student named Sarah Hemingway who said that Greg stole her research on gravitational waves. Hemingway has always loved astrophysics and had once approached Greg asking to be one of his graduate students, sharing some data from research she conducted before. Greg rejected her application to be in his research group, forcing Hemingway to find luck elsewhere. However, Greg had kept the data and used it in his award-winning discovery of gravitational waves last year.

By the time The Athenian brought this issue to the Dean, the Academic Integrity Board had already been investigating Greg’s credibility. After looking through his Internet history, it was discovered that he had stolen half of his lectures from Reddit posts and all his photos from Twitter.

At press time, Greg had already cleaned out his office. When The Athenianapproached Greg about his recent termination, all he said was, “Tell them that BuzzFeed will be paying me more than they did.”